Global glacier index

This winter has involved a lot of debate on climate changed based around anecdotes: ‘it is snowing in England, therefore it isn’t happening’ or ‘there are terrible fires in Austalia so it is.’ In the end, while anecdotes can provide the imagery that motivates people to act, it is only through the analysis of large amounts of data that high quality conclusions can be reached.

On that front, the global glacier index update on RealClimate is a good example. They examine data on the mass balances of glaciers around the world between 1980 and present, revealing a very clear trend. Similar statistical analysis is performed on the terminus behaviour of the glaciers.

Human beings have a tendency to place undue weight on things we happened to personally observe recently. It’s part of a set of heuristics that aids our functioning in some circumstances, but it does us a great disservice when we are contemplating phenomena that are exterior to our normal modes of operation.

Gore rattled off the names of the great rivers that carry Himalayan snowmelt to the teeming populations of China, Pakistan, India and other parts of southeast Asia, and to the farmlands that feed them.

“When the glaciers disappear, the source of the water will disappear,” Gore told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Also, my (albeit v limited) understanding of climate change is that it involves some places experiencing more severe, sometimes colder or wetter, weather too. The snow in England was a freak event in many ways, and, accepting your warning about reading too much into isolated incidents, could provide as much anaecdotal evidence of things getting weird as the wildfires in Australia.

In the UK we certaintly seem to be breaking weather records every other month lately (wettest summer on record, hottest day, thickest snow for 20 years etc etc). Should we read anything into this, or are there so many permutations and measurements of weather that it’s very easy to make superlative claims?

It is a tricky balancing act, to both acknowledge that climate change will certainly produce some weird and extreme events, while also recognizing that the attribution of particular events to climate change is problematic, at best.

Climate change will definitely alter precipitation patterns. In some areas, that will mean more snow (though possibly at higher normal winter temperatures than existed beforehand).

Right now, a huge amount of effort is being dedicated to ‘downscaled’ global climate models so as to be able to provide more precise estimates of the effects of different degrees of warming in different areas.

Geneva — Antarctic glaciers are melting faster across a much wider area than previously thought, scientists said Wednesday — a development that could lead to an unprecedented rise in sea levels.

A report by thousands of scientists for the 2007-2008 International Polar Year concluded that the western part of the continent is warming up, not just the Antarctic Peninsula.

Previously most of the warming was thought to occur on the narrow stretch pointing toward South America, said Colin Summerhayes, executive director of the Britain-based Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research and a member of International Polar Year’s steering committee.

The University of Zurich’s World Glacier Monitoring Service reported earlier this year, “The new data continues the global trend in accelerated ice loss over the past few decades.” The rate of ice loss is twice as fast as a decade ago. “The main thing that we can do to stop this is reduce greenhouse gases” said Michael Zemp, a researcher at the University of Zurich’s Department of Geography.

Greenland and parts of Antarctica are losing large volumes of ice to the oceans as their glaciers get thinner, a Nasa satellite has revealed.

Many glaciers have increased their flow rates in recent years, and the Icesat mission now allows scientists to measure their thickness in detail.

A UK team studying the data told the journal Nature that the findings had implications for future sea-level rise.

A full melt of the Greenland ice would push sea level up by about 7m (20ft).

The extent of “dynamic thinning”, observed by the satellite, has been a major source of uncertainty in projections of sea-level rise.

“All of the glaciers that are changing rapidly are ones that flow into the sea,” said Hamish Pritchard from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).

“The fact that they end in the sea means a buoyancy effect is working on them,” he told BBC News.

“Normally, they’re heavy things and they rest on the sea-bed and friction slows them down. But as you start to thin glaciers, they start to float off the sea-bed more and more; there’s less friction and the glaciers can speed up.”

For several years, Balog has been going up north to shoot the half-alive ice of the mammoth glaciers for his Extreme Ice Survey, a look at the shocking effects of abrupt climate change in Alaska, Greenland and Iceland. Soaring, dripping, glowing and crumbling, arctic ice under Balog’s eye requires the viewer to engage.